Slashdot’s new interface could kill what keeps Slashdot relevant

Flashy revamp seeks to draw new faces to the community—at the cost of the old.

In the modern responsive Web Three Point Oh Internet, Slashdot stands like a thing frozen in time—it's a coelacanth stuck incongruously in an aquarium full of more colorful fish. The technology news aggregator site has been around since 1997, making it positively ancient as websites are reckoned. More importantly, Slashdot's long focus on open source technology news and topics has caused it to accrete a user base that tends to be extremely technical, extremely skilled, and extremely opinionated.

That user base is itself the main reason why Slashdot continues to thrive, even as its throwback interface makes it look to untrained eyes like a dated relic. Though the site is frequently a source of deep and rich commentary on topics, the barrier for new users to engage in the site's discussions is relatively high—certainly higher than, say, reddit (or even Ars). This doesn't cause much concern to the average Slashdot user, but tech job listing site Dice.com (which bought Slashdot in September 2012, along with Sourceforge and a number of other digital properties) appears to have decided it's time to drag Slashdot's interface into the 21st century in order to make things comfortable for everyone—old and new users alike.

And the Slashdot user base is not pleased.

Change for change’s sake?

Slashdot's interface has been modified a few times over the years, and each time there has been some amount of protest. However, no prior redesign has included as many sweeping alterations as the Slashdot Beta. In 2006, a major interface update that brought rounded edges to many of the site's visual elements and stuffed JavaScript under the hood caused major upset—the engineering- and programming-focused Slashdot community is collectively not a fan of change for change's sake.

The rage over the new Slashdot Beta, though, makes any previous instances of interface outrage look positively pedestrian. This time, the upset isn't over JavaScript or rounded corners, but over what many Slashdot users see as a removal of the site's most vital features.

Enlarge/ Classic Slashdot on the left, Beta Slashdot on the right. Many users are angry about the larger typeface, fewer comment filters, and far lower information density.

For most of its life, Slashdot had a roughly similar user interface—black text, white background, green accents. Though graphically sparse, the site's interface has remained functional throughout its evolution. The change to Beta brings responsive design and updated typography, and it blows out the information-dense Slashdot interface with lots of white space. The beta is currently optional (and automatically shown to 25 percent of non-logged-in users), and it lacks many of the features that long-time users depend on to guide discussion and discourse—Slashdot user IDs aren't displayed, and the ability to filter comments based on moderation is substantially limited.

That last part is particularly problematic for regular Slashdot users since Slashdot has a very powerful comment moderation system (which in turn has a meta-moderation system to keep the moderation system honest), and users can tune the comments they see to a very fine degree. Not so with the Beta—not yet, anyway.

Enlarge/ The newer interface in its current incarnation (at right) displays a significant amount of white space.

The perceived deficiencies are bad enough to have sparked an actual protest, with Slashdot discussion threads first filling up with users posting off-topic "#fuckbeta" messages, and now with many users participating in a comment boycott.

Worse, comments from the site's administrators that were clearly intended to soothe the mob have in fact done just the opposite. In a posting from February 6, Slashdot editor Timothy Lord acknowledged that Beta still has a long way to go and that many more changes are coming; however, he said two things that unintentionally caused additional damage.

"We want to take our current content and all the stuff that matters to this community and deliver it on a site that still speaks to the interests and habits of our current audience, but that is, at the same time, more accessible and shareable by a wider audience," wrote Lord. "We want to give our current audience the space where they are comfortable." The use of the word "audience" did not sit well with the community—not at all.

"We are not an audience," responded user steveg. "We might be users, we might be members, we most certainly are contributors. But we are not an audience. If you persist in thinking of us that way, then you're going to get it wrong." The comment continued:

If we were an audience, we'd be coming here for the articles. Most of the complaints are about the comment system, how difficult it is to follow a conversation, how difficult it is leave a comment, etc. I come here, most of us come here, to read what my/our fellow slashdotters have to say. The value here is the community, and the most important contributors are other members, not the site or the editors.

If you don't get that straight, then you aren't going to "get" why we're upset, so there's no chance that you'll deliver us something that we can live with. And that community is going to vanish, leaving you with nothing of value.

This is the fundamental problem between how the corporate overlords think and how the community thinks. Until this difference is resolved you will get the continual complaints and the eventual mass exodus. We are a community. We are not an audience.

I submit stories. I read stories. I add comments. I moderate comments. I am the reason that there is ad revenue.

I am Slashdot.

The commenters have a point. I've been a Slashdot reader since 2000; I have a low 6-digit UID, and until I started working at Ars, Slashdot was my browser home page—I've been a small part of that community for 14 years, and Slashdot is and always has been an entirely user-driven site with very little visible editorial contribution. Users submit the stories to the site; users vote up stories they want to see on the front page and then comment on those stories. Slashdot isn't a site where you go to read breaking technology news—it's a site where you go to read good commentary about that news (at least, it's good if you browse at +3). Pumping new blood into the site potentially at the cost of the old will make Slashdot into something that's not Slashdot.

Beyond the perceived slight at the nature of Slashdot commenters, Lord drew further fire with this statement: "Most importantly," Lord noted, "we want you to know that Classic Slashdot isn't going away until we're confident that the new site is ready."

When matched with the post's "We hear you!" tone, the subtext that Beta will eventually be the only interface available served to undermine the entire message, drawing accusations of corporate doubletalk:

I've heard all this shit before - that the guys in charge are listening to your efforts, that your concerns are being taken under advisement and that the end result will something everyone will appreciate. What people here especially hate most of all is fucking corporate speak they've heard a thousand times before and despite from the bottom of their hearts. It's patronizing to the audience who know exactly how things will play out. They always follow the same formula....

It won’t work here

For most sites, a redesign isn't a big deal—Ars has certainly had its share, and we will have more as we evolve. But Slashdot is unique in that there is no other place on the Internet with quite the same mix of entrenched knowledge and personalities. The user base skews heavily toward developers, and unlike StackExchange or other, newer communities, this community has been allowed to ossify for more than a decade. Programmers—and most of the core active Slashdot community are programmers to the bone—don't like it when their tools are changed for no reason, and slapping a fresh coat of paint onto the front of the site without delivering any obvious value to those core users isn't going to work.

Enlarge/ The first two Ars stories ever to appear on Slashdot, back in January 1999. Perhaps fittingly, it's actually the same link—the second story is a dupe of the first.

The redesign puts Dice and the Slashdot editors into a very difficult position: unlike most other sites, the primary value of Slashdot really is in the user base. Slashdot's editors rarely editorialize and report—most Slashdot articles are a short (user-written) summary and one or more links. The site's content is the comments, and those are provided and curated by the user base. Alienating that user base in favor of new users isn't the right monetization strategy for Slashdot—without its entrenched user base, the site becomes just another bland news aggregator.

It used to be relatively common to see posts on Slashdot from folks like John Carmack, Wil Wheaton, Steve Wozniak, and Eric S. Raymond. The site was one of the most sane and insightful sources of commentary on the Columbine massacre back in 1999 (in spite of those stories being written by one of Slashdot's most infamous guest authors, Jon Katz), and the site remained up and running during the World Trade Center attack on September 11, 2001 even while major news sites imploded under the load. Slashdot on the Web is a lot like the sun in the sky—it feels like it has always been there and always will be.

Ars Technica and Slashdot go back a long way—we link each others' stories quite often, and though Slashdot lacks the strength which in old days could knock sites offline merely by linking to them, it remains a brilliant community of commenters. To sweep that community aside in favor of something else would be tragic.

239 Reader Comments

The turmoil surrounding Slashdot and, it's presently expatriated community, goes deeper than what most people would easily understand. It's not so much about being "forced" into a Beta interface, but more about a company which has been systematically buying up some of the great hacker resources on the Internet and turning them into ad revenue first, and hacker resource second[1]. Hop over to sourceforge.net sometime and see how it's turned into a minefield of drive-by downloads when you try and access a project. Sourceforge was first, Slashdot looks to be second and that's what's got a lot of people upset.

Hackers being who they are, they don't stand around and complain (for very long) before they start doing something about it and that's where Slashcott[2] comes in. That's where the fiery ranting of the "F-ck Beta" posts come in. That's where places like soylentnews[3] and others come in.

There's way more here that has people upset than just a site re-design. Hackers easily understand those problems. No, Dice has basically alienated the user base which made slashdot great and if sourceforge is any indication, slashdot has "jumped the shark" and will never be the unique resource it once was.

Lee, you're a very sneaky guy; I see what you did here. I'm twiddling my thumbs now, waiting to see how long it takes for this article to hit Slashdot's front page... or will the editors give every submission of it a smackdown? Let the fun ensue.

The Washington Post, not exactly a weekly pennysaver, interviewed Rob Malda, the guy who created Slashdot, about beta and the reaction to it, and someone submitted a link to that as a story at Slashdot, where said story, despite getting a number of replies, remains buried in the Firehose, never to see the light of the main page.

If WAPO/Malda can't make the front page, I don't hold out much hope for this article.

I stopped reading /. a few years ago. While I often found the user comments to be very well thought out and insightful, that impression was really obliterated the couple times I read the comments for articles that were about things I was actually fully informed about (usually due to my job at a company that was often a subject of /. articles). It was when I actually knew a lot about the subject at hand that I realized that the vast, vast majority of the comments were well-written, entirely plausible, highly-opinionated, and totally wrong. Over time I extrapolated this observation and came to distrust all the comments, on every article, in spite of their apparent insightfulness. (But admittedly, there were often a lot of super funny comments too, which I miss.)

I very well could be wrong. And I certainly agree that the site is totally about the comments and the /.'s success is vitally dependent on the moderation and meta-moderation system. If they don't fix that in the beta, they are in fact doomed.

While I definitely consider myself an ex-reader of /., I do hope they survive this tumult and come through with a better site for their community, not some ad-revenue-generating "audience."

Except that the Ars model has scorekeeping built into it right now - those numbers next to the up and down arrows.

That's not what I mean by scorekeeping. I mean a persistent system like Slashdot's karma score, or tying specific achievements or perks to obtaining scores. The up/down vote count right is not a score because there's no consequence for it. A +4 and a +1 and a -2 are all treated the same. If you use the forum, the score isn't even shown.

Quote:

I've not proposed to change any of this.

What does "promoting" comments mean, then, if not a change to the display priority?

Quote:

The scoring right now is a "simple sum" (Agree+Disagree=Total).

Right, and it doesn't sound like you've suggested changing that. Your (Agree+Disagree-Troll) doesn't capture a difference between "disagree" and "troll" except to categorize. A -1 stays a -1 in that scenario.

If you're saying that your "Disagree" button doesn't change the net vote count up or down, then all that would happen is that it wouldn't be used and the people you're hoping to stop would use the "troll" button for everything.

Quote:

The only difference between what we have now and the one I'm proposing is that "I don't agree with what you're saying" and "you are trolling" aren't treated as the same, negative (and therefore likely to be collapsed), thing.

But there's no reason to treat them differently. What percentage of comments are collapsed? What percentage of collapsed comments aren't trolls? What percentage of those were close enough that taking away some of the downvotes would have saved them? What percentage of those would posters then actually get involved to save with your special no-score negative vote (instead of just clicking the "up" button)?

You're talking about such an infinitesimally small group that I can't see it making a difference, but if you've got numbers from another online community, I'd be interested.

Quote:

If you're going to collapse low scoring comments (which happens, right now, on Ars) then people are going to treat it as a validation tool. As in, is their comment worthwhile enough to be even seen when the page loads?

When the rate of collapsed comments is under 1% (as it is on Ars), then it's working exactly as intended. If you're consistently finding yourself in that category, regardless of topic or thread, it's not just because you hold a minority view.

The fact that the Slashdot staff would consider a change this drastic shows they don't know their user base. The people I know who still visit Slashdot regularly are the kind of people who hate any web site designed with modern aesthetics.

I'm sure that their traffic has been shrinking over time, and it's understandable to want to reverse that trend. But when you have such an entrenched, opinionated, and frankly IMHO, backwards thinking user base you have to realize that it's not really much of an option. Their best bet is to start something new if they want to pursue new readers.

I've been visiting /. for a few years now (mostly as AC.) The way I use it is to visit frequently but remember to let moderation do its work. Since the "news" is not really anyway, I find it pays to let the users moderate and meta-moderate and visit a day later on topics I'm interested in to see the most insightful commentary. By then the trolls have been modded down.

I don't really take issue with the M$ers or Walled-Garden! or free-or-free? folks. That's their opinion and while I find it tired at times I still have yet to find a place better for hearing opinions that expand my perceptions on topics that interest me. Some I don't care for at all, but it's worth my time when I find those opinions from folks that seem to know their shit.

That said. I'm boycotting. I think that the commenting system is /. is the users and they cannot be separated and still get the same result. The mobile site post comments in a weird way that sort of presents comments in some order and the Thread link doesn't really work all that well. Seems to me that the beta is going for this effect as well.

I'm rooting for soylentnews (is people!) and will support them once they get going.

The fact that the Slashdot staff would consider a change this drastic shows they don't know their user base. The people I know who still visit Slashdot regularly are the kind of people who hate any web site designed with modern aesthetics.

I'm sure that their traffic has been shrinking over time, and it's understandable to want to reverse that trend. But when you have such an entrenched, opinionated, and frankly IMHO, backwards thinking user base you have to realize that it's not really much of an option. Their best bet is to start something new if they want to pursue new readers.

And I say this as #34786.

Actually I agree, which paradoxically invalidates your point (#34680)

#27836.

And I agree totally.

Leave the "old" Slashdot to the compulsive refreshers and commenters (I'm no longer among them), and start a new site for the broader demographic. Trying to modernize Slashdot at this stage is a lost cause.

I'm sure that their traffic has been shrinking over time, and it's understandable to want to reverse that trend. But when you have such an entrenched, opinionated, and frankly IMHO, backwards thinking user base you have to realize that it's not really much of an option. Their best bet is to start something new if they want to pursue new readers.

And I say this as #34786.

I'm not sure it's accurate to call the Slashdot community "backwards thinking". We've simply gotten used to the features and the community that we can't get really anywhere else. They're the very features which we ourselves have helped evolve over time.

Any site redesign is going to get some level of push back. I haven't been an Ars user for anywhere close to as long as I've been a member of Slashdot , but I recall plenty of complaints about the last redesign here. I wasn't that thrilled with it either but it didn't change the core functionality of the site, so my complaints were minimal, and I've since gotten used to them.

The new Slashdot beta has completely killed the primary features that make Slashdot such a good community for the people who visit. It's not backwards to not want the primary draw to be eliminated.

I suspect, that if Dice can come up with a redesign that implements the features that their tech-savvy users want, the remaining complaints about style will blow over quickly.

If they didn't want a strong community and comment-driven site for highly technical users, then they should have purchased a different website.

The problem with that, and maybe I'm just doing it wrong, is that it notifies when there are ANY comments posted to the comments at all, not just direct replies to my specific comment.

That's pretty much how every BB-Software works. Since we don't reply to someone as such, they are just reference-quoted.

Though it would be interesting to see such a feature implemented:---> Subject: ArsTechnica Forums: Scorp!us has quoted you.

Slashdot threading is pretty much usenet, which is also similiar to the reverse GMail threading.

I would comment much more if there was a feature like that. I don't like to leave "drive-by" comments. If someone has a reaction or reply to something I wrote I want to know about it, and probably respond.

Right now that means I have to turn on notifications for the whole thread and then spend days getting emails about it. On a smallish article or something I feel strongly about I can live with that. I can handle digesting the whole conversation.

But when I spend over an hour reading all 5 pages of comments on something popular, I think long and hard before adding my own two cents because it probably means committing to at least as much time reading the inevitable next 5 pages of comments.

Don't get me wrong, in an ideal world I'd always have time to keep up with it all. But in this reality I can't even keep up with all the articles I want to read. There have got to be more viable spots on the continuum of participation than just "none" and "total".

Whilst I'm not trying to draw any parallels with the site content or purpose, I am reminded of the Engadget redesign some years ago where they got rid of all the information and instead put in lots of pretty flashing pictures. I haven't been back since.

I deleted my toolbar bookmark to /. last week, and don't really see a need to go back. I've been on there forever, and it was usually a regular stop to catch up on things. The articles have become largely irrelivent over time, or at least posted long after I've read the information elsewhere.

The articles were never the draw though. It was the comments, and destroying that system with this Beta shit, and driving people away means that I have zero reason to go there.

So, basically done with /. It's ashame though. I've been on there a long time. Longer than on ARS for sure.

Let's compare Slashdot to Ars for example. While I have been here, I have read through 168 comments in a flat, unthreaded list. While that is fine, these comments were spread over 4 pages, each requiring a new load.

As to actually adding my own two cents to the conversation: Ars requires yet another of that great modern curses of the internet -- a login -- in order to post. To get this, I need to give a username, set up yet another password, give my email address, opt out of spam emails, and of course confirm my email address via a link. FInally, once signed up, I had to dodge a subscription page then click back on the browser to return to this page to actually write this comment.

On Slashdot, you can post anonymously. You click reply, type your comment, fill in the CAPTCHA, and press submit. If the comment is good enough, then even as an AC, it can be expected to be moderated up, be more visible and add to the discussion. It can become a jumping off point for a new subthread of replies, expanding the discussion further. Moreover, it's possible to scroll through hundreds of headers and comments with only one page load.

Anonymous posting isn't even possible here at Ars. Comments are simply inserted into the thread list, and bounced up and down by votes.

I've tried posting info/corrections as AC on Slashdot a number of times, and it never gets anywhere. Just sits at -1, invisible and ignored. Very discouraging. (OTOH, ironically, it's a chore to wade through the Slashdot Beta's sea of unfiltered comments.)

At least on Ars, your post doesn't start out fucking invisible, and has to accrue a large negative ratio to get hidden. (Maybe the flat view works for Ars because there are fewer comments/commenters total.)

I stopped reading /. a few years ago. While I often found the user comments to be very well thought out and insightful, that impression was really obliterated the couple times I read the comments for articles that were about things I was actually fully informed about (usually due to my job at a company that was often a subject of /. articles). It was when I actually knew a lot about the subject at hand that I realized that the vast, vast majority of the comments were well-written, entirely plausible, highly-opinionated, and totally wrong. Over time I extrapolated this observation and came to distrust all the comments, on every article, in spite of their apparent insightfulness. (But admittedly, there were often a lot of super funny comments too, which I miss.)

I've made the same observation. It's why Slashdot was such fertile ground for trolling in the old days: As long as a post was articulate and sufficiently arrogant, it would be moderated up even if the conclusion was completely ridiculous.

I think the site long ago turned into a sort of Generation X technology retirement home, where people dredge up ancient complaints about Microsoft (they still talk about DRDOS!), weep for the Amiga computer, and generally complain about everything invented after 1995. So it shouldn't be a surprise that they hate the redesign, even though the current javascript slider thing is terrible.

Let's compare Slashdot to Ars for example. While I have been here, I have read through 168 comments in a flat, unthreaded list. While that is fine, these comments were spread over 4 pages, each requiring a new load.

As to actually adding my own two cents to the conversation: Ars requires yet another of that great modern curses of the internet -- a login -- in order to post. To get this, I need to give a username, set up yet another password, give my email address, opt out of spam emails, and of course confirm my email address via a link. FInally, once signed up, I had to dodge a subscription page then click back on the browser to return to this page to actually write this comment.

On Slashdot, you can post anonymously. You click reply, type your comment, fill in the CAPTCHA, and press submit. If the comment is good enough, then even as an AC, it can be expected to be moderated up, be more visible and add to the discussion. It can become a jumping off point for a new subthread of replies, expanding the discussion further. Moreover, it's possible to scroll through hundreds of headers and comments with only one page load.

Anonymous posting isn't even possible here at Ars. Comments are simply inserted into the thread list, and bounced up and down by votes.

I've tried posting info/corrections as AC on Slashdot a number of times, and it never gets anywhere. Just sits at -1, invisible and ignored. Very discouraging. (OTOH, ironically, it's a chore to wade through the Slashdot Beta's sea of unfiltered comments.)

At least on Ars, your post doesn't start out fucking invisible, and has to accrue a large negative ratio to get hidden. (Maybe the flat view works for Ars because there are fewer comments/commenters total.)

AC's on /. are supposed to start at 0, not -1. Nobody starts at -1 unless it's a registered user with really bad karma, and I don't know if they even do that anymore.

So much this. Though it also drove me away that there was no way to read threads and comments easily on my mobile device. It loaded the entire normal page, and on a small screen that didn't work for me. The redesign at least addresses that issue. I still check in from time to time.

/807603

Yup, I lurked on Ars for years before registering. I read /. and Ars daily for years before dropping the former. Ars is my main community site nowadays.

Dunno. Been reading Ars for some time now and it is getting less and less technical+, sadly. (Perhaps a general trend?) Looks like I have missed out on something good by never trying Slashdot. Unfortunately I am not inclined to keep following multiple sites

Dunno. Been reading Ars for some time now and it is getting less and less technical+, sadly. (Perhaps a general trend?) Looks like I have missed out on something good by never trying Slashdot. Unfortunately I am not inclined to keep following multiple sites

#54399 here, though I'd been using the site as AC for a very long time before a buddy cajoled me into registering so he could keep track of my comments. I used to read/comment daily for years on /. but just logged in because of the Ars story to realize that I haven't looked at the website for almost a year, and had only made a handful of comments in the last 5 years.

I think the primary reason I stopped reading Slashdot is that Ars duplicated most of the news I cared about on /. plus had great additional and original content on top of that. Slashdot more or less ossified over time, and it increasingly felt more bland and filled with stale news. Even before CmdrTaco left, I felt like I was just checking in out of habit...

Oh, BTW: A Beowulf cluster run by the Gay Nigger Association of America has concluded that Netcraft confirms that Natalie Portman, naked and petrified, has had hot grits poured down her pants by CowboyNeal--you insensitive clod! Frist Psot!?

I don't understand how some of you think the borg cube would win against the death star... Its a moon-sized sphere of complete planet disintegration with its own ridiculous compliment of turbolaser batteries. We aren't talking about a couple phasers pointed a the borg cube here, but instead, a planet destroyer beam and a thousand turbolasers. The borg are screwed. Hands down. I don't know why there is a question.

.. it scales up to the full width of my monitor instead of taking just the middle 50% of the screen when I maximize my browser.

However, if you don't maximize the browser on a large screen, or if you use a laptop or netbook with a smaller screen, part of the page are hidden away so you can't use them. No slashboxes, no poll, etc.That is inexcusable.

I have a 4 digit username and still remember when it was called Chips and Dips. The stuff that is going on there shows they seem to have forgotten what CmdrTaco set out to create. We'll see what happens but it's not looking good...

/. was like high school--cool while you were there and belonged there, not so cool if you were there in your 20's or 30's hanging out with sophomores. I used to read /. religiously, like many of the other posters here. (I guess since everyone is posting their UID's I should mentioned that mine is 6 digits and starts with 1; there are always lower ones as the comments show though.)

After a while, I started to notice that even though the stories were mostly interesting (if you ignored the mindstream garbage that was JonKatz) and while the comments *could* be gold (heck, you had John Carmack of id Software replying directly to some posters for crying out loud), mostly the comments reflected the standard 18 - 25, 90% male "first post" demographic. I guess you could say I grew weary of the constant sophomoric behavior. And so I migrated here to Ars for my formerly Mac-centric daily dose of tech news.

You tend to see the world differently in your 30's than in your 20's, and I'm sure I'll see the world differently again in my 40's when that happens this year. If the news outlet you choose reflects that reality, then great. If not, there are many others out there. One day I may find myself in my 60's reading nothing but the Economist, the WSJ, and whatever latest memoirs has been published by a former high-ranking administration official.

For now, though, it's Ars. And while I still like the site--I've been a subscriptor, traded emails with editors, offered to write articles, etc.--I find myself liking it a bit less than I used to. John Timmer evangelism science reminds me of JonKatzian ad generation, though Timmer at least knows how to play to his audience. I intentionally read moderated-down comments to see what the other side of the group-think user base is, and one day I may unfortunately decide that there is more that I don't like than what I do.

But until then Ars, has been a great site, and I'm thankful that it exists.

I think you summarized my feelings on this better than I was going to be able to. I don't mind the strong opinions the editors and contributors to Ars seem to have though.

I miss /. occasionally when I feel like a useless flame war is needed or the little nuggets of awk someone would throw in that suddenly made your scripts a little more elegant. The new look is terrible but I'm maybe just nostalgic. Now they've got Badges like Foursquare? Really?

User #1143Yeah, I was there before they had accounts with numbers. Bought Rob a beer at a Linux convention in San Jose in 1997 I think and in return got a T-shirt that seems to have shrunk a bit...

Huh, the news to me here is that Slashdot was still relevant. I used to follow it very closely, but got tired of their opinionated and biased posts and comments and stopped reading. Excellent sites like Ars Technica and AnandTech provide much much much more value to me.

I agree - I was an active slashdot member for more than a decade, but the collective community has declined tremendously in the past 3 years. I find the dialog in the forums to be almost unreadable now, and for years I relied on the interpretations from users on slashdot to help me understand a range of complex and new ideas and technologies.

I now read Ars, GigaOm and similar for news. That said, I don't find the comments on these sites to be particularly useful, but the reporting and analysis is great and largely replaces the community I used to rely on at slashdot.

As someone with a low user id, I've always taken comments about low user ids as nothing more than humor. On the other hand, brand new user id's are often helpful in deciding if the poster is trolling or really does have legit intentions and is just poor at expressing them.

As someone who's been lurking (and occasionally posting as AC) on Slashdot, I fnd the whole UID thing to be somewhat perplexing. And if anything, the fact that if I registered now, I'd have have to suffer the eternal stigma of having telephone number for a UID discourages me from starting a new /. account at this point.

[Edit: but weirdly, on reflection I actually don't have any problem with Ars displaying registration dates at all...]

I've tried posting info/corrections as AC on Slashdot a number of times, and it never gets anywhere. Just sits at -1, invisible and ignored. Very discouraging. (OTOH, ironically, it's a chore to wade through the Slashdot Beta's sea of unfiltered comments.)

At least on Ars, your post doesn't start out fucking invisible, and has to accrue a large negative ratio to get hidden. (Maybe the flat view works for Ars because there are fewer comments/commenters total.)

This is consistent with my experiences at both Ars and /. -- I think I like it better over here.

Except that the Ars model has scorekeeping built into it right now - those numbers next to the up and down arrows.

That's not what I mean by scorekeeping. I mean a persistent system like Slashdot's karma score, or tying specific achievements or perks to obtaining scores. The up/down vote count right is not a score because there's no consequence for it. A +4 and a +1 and a -2 are all treated the same. If you use the forum, the score isn't even shown.

Quote:

I've not proposed to change any of this.

What does "promoting" comments mean, then, if not a change to the display priority?

Apologies, This post has been edited as I initially inferred you didn't understand the existing system but then realised I'd used the wrong terminology. When a vote gets above 25 it becomes a "reader favourite". When I said "promoted" I actually meant "reader favourite".

The "reader favourite", "controversial" and collapsed comments are all features of the Ars commenting system today.

In other words, I'm not suggesting we change any of that, merely differentiate between trolling and opinions that people disagree with - rather than lumping the two together and penalising comments that we don't agree with in the same way as people who are just causing mischief.

I'd like to also add that I'm not suggesting a karma score or that Ars should change its moderation system to be anything like the Slashdot one.

I've tried posting info/corrections as AC on Slashdot a number of times, and it never gets anywhere. Just sits at -1, invisible and ignored. Very discouraging. (OTOH, ironically, it's a chore to wade through the Slashdot Beta's sea of unfiltered comments.)

At least on Ars, your post doesn't start out fucking invisible, and has to accrue a large negative ratio to get hidden. (Maybe the flat view works for Ars because there are fewer comments/commenters total.)

This is consistent with my experiences at both Ars and /. -- I think I like it better over here.

I like the articles better here, but you can get better in-depth commentary at /. when things eventually get there. I visit both about equally.

I'm always logged in when I visit /. so only saw the mess of the beta by choice when I looked to see what the fuss was about. This article is right, the beta shows that they don't understand what they have in /. and what makes it work. Its one of the few places on the web that works as originally intended, it delivers what the old-time users want, dense information with minimum forced layout. Changing that to a magazine layout with more white space and site dictated fonts etc will kill it. In fact, unless they listen rather than hear the feedback and retract the beta and go back to the drawing board soon, I think they've killed it already.

Lee Hutchinson / Lee is the Senior Reviews Editor at Ars and is responsible for the product news and reviews section. He also knows stuff about enterprise storage, security, and manned space flight. Lee is based in Houston, TX.